Saturday, 30 January 2010

It's Saturday! Time to forget about the worries of the week and watch some cartoons with the kids! For those of you who can't handle all this loud nonsense the kids consume these days, a bit of vintage entertainment. Amazing how much things have changed over the years.

Thursday, 28 January 2010

Look at this video from one of contributors "AF". It got a mention on Crap Waltham Forest, but they don't know the background and were criticising it.

MM52SKJ is forced to use this bus lane, and has to swerve round a bicycle in the way, an action which that traffic island doesn't help.

The big problems here are the narrow-to-one bit of the bus lane, where two lanes of bus traffic comes in. The bike cuts up the car as it goes through here, stopping them from getting past until through the lights.

We don't see the cyclist looking round, if they had seen or heard the car they should have let it past.

The cyclists shouldn't whine about it as the thing that threatens them is not a car like this, it is the buses on the route. Indeed, the cyclist, AF, who took this photo ended up clipped by a bus on Jan 17 and is now apparently trying to get the local police stations to not turn him away and follow up the incident.

The real question is why bikes are here where they get in the way of buses, taxis, and cars? In a Q&A article in the local newspaper, the infamous James Carmichael, Highridge asked this very question:

Q. How does First intend to deal with the fact that it is currently obliged to share bus lanes with cyclists, leading to delays in bus services?

A. The definition of a bus lane is not ours, it is the city council, they put out traffic orders which say it can be used by taxis or cyclists.
We don't necessarily see cyclists as a problem.
The biggest problem is motorists or delivery vans parking in them.

Well, FirstBus are missing a point: shoppers and vans need to park, whereas cyclists could use different routes. Banning bicycles from this bit of the centre would reduce the danger to bikes and pedestrians, and improve bus schedules -while letting cars through.

This is important, and it something we will return to soon. The council has a proposal to make the centre even more bus and less car. We aren't actually against this, provided the council can keep the bikes out of the bus lanes, where they are needlessly endangering themselves.

The 1930 Road Traffic Act removed the 30 mph speed limit. It was re-instated in 1934 even though pedestrian deaths had fallen.

When Belisha Beacons first came out there was a campaign against them, the captain gatso of its day, and people used to throw stones at them to break them. This idea of campaigning against zebra crossings appeals to us, though we do like the fact they act as short-stay parking for shoppers.

In 1934 the Daily Telegraph was running its anti-pedestrian campaign then, calling for punishment for bad/careless/dangerous walking, while the Daily Mail was complaining that the government was picking on the motorist.

A national road safety foundation, the NSFA, strongly funded by the motoring companies, resisted needless government interference -driving licenses, 30 mph limits- and instead focused on educating children and pedestrians.

Pedestrian barriers were put in in London to stop pedestrians crossing except at approved points. We thought they were there to keep bicycles in the kerb and take away our paveparking, but clearly not.

The Times was campaigning against Zebra crossings way back in 1954. We thought our Zebras belong in Zoos campaign was innovative, but not only were we merely reflecting the ongoing activities of Bristol's drivers, the war against zebra crossings has been going on for over fifty years.

Light controlled junctions (first, "panda" crossings) to keep pedestrians out our way went in the early 1960s, ever since then slow, unfit people have been whining about not getting enough time. Move faster! Isn't walking meant to keep you fit! You put your foot down when we rev our engines and sound our horns -so why wait until then!

These panda crossings were like zebra x-ings with a red light too, a "stop" and a "really-stop" for cars, and pedestrians had to wait for a really stop bit to pull out.

Later pelican crossings had the stop/really stop bit, the flashing lights phase. Originally it meant that pedestrians could still cross, but now its been changed to cars can get in gear then go, like the red-amber phase on traffic lights

It was a socialist government, and Barbara Castle, that introduced motorway speed limits and brethalyzers -the big anti-driver laws of the 1960s.

It's a fascinating twenty page read to see the struggle to resist anti-car pedestrians -historically the poor and working class, now the over-educated elitists. Our backers have been the people who get things doe -the House of Lords, the police, the German and Italian fascist goverments (Germany did introduce a "careless walking" fine as well as building the A-Bahn's). It's also interesting to see how the Daily Mail and Telegraph haven't suddenly jumped on the bandwagon needs of us, the British Motorist, they have been supporting us for as long as they've been saying Oswald Mosely and Enoch Powell should be listened to.

It's a shame to see so many attempts to rein in the pedestrians have failed -we never knew about red-painted kerbs at £20 spot fines for pedestrians, but apparently this was tried in central london in 1966. Bring it back, we say! All that has gone in from those time is the separation strategy, pedestrian overpasses and underpasses.

We shall cover them soon, as our fellow-travellers the Association of British Drivers are trying to bring them back to the Bristol centre. Now we have better historical understanding of their origin we can put them in their context.

On thing on the final page of the article:

Policy innovations seem to have been inspired not by casualty figures or public outcry about them, but by two main factors : popular hostility towards, confusion about, or lack of observance of previous pedestrian crossings or road safety campaigns ; and the desire not to impede traffic flow as congestion in town centres worsened.

We say: exactly. Zebra crossings impede traffic flow, as do other pedestrians running around our streets.

Tuesday, 26 January 2010

This area round Colston Primary school has a double role. It's commuter parking par-excellence, and its somewhere for parents to drive their kids to school, either here or Cotham School slightly up the hill. Anyone doing the school-run there knows that Cotham Park North is the turnoff to take.

Yet now, we see buildouts going in, buildouts with bollards planned. This is the price of having the city's Councillor for Walking the locally elected representative.

There was a perfectly good "switch off your engines while waiting" sign up by the school-keep-clear dropoff zone, and now what? More lines, more signs, more bollards

For the parents, the one redeeming feature is that the final draft resident parking zones are up, and this road is in it. If there is only one resident parked here on a Saturday, we can assume that if commuters cannot park here on a weekday, there will be plenty of space for short-stay dropoffs.

Indeed, we suspect the anti-schoolrun developments at Colston's are primarily to push all those parents in favour of resident parking, to split the drivers up into residents, commuters and school-runners, so stop us unifying against an anti car council.

More signs of trouble by the A38. This is Zetland Road, the A38 Northbound is the road curving left in the distance. That is the road that a cyclist ended up in critical condition after a crash with a car turning right into somerfields. While we extend our concerns and sympathies to our families, we are also concerned that the evening post removed all comments criticising cyclists on that news article and have now locked it off to futher comments -after only 24 hours of letting us vent our feelings. This is censorship, and a sign that the E.P is slowly becoming sensitive to the feelings of the family and friends of injured cyclists. That is the slippery slope to not printing Lycra-Louts-the-Enemy-Within articles on a weekly basis, which worries us.

Returning to Zetland Road, there are now some changes. First, a big red sign, "signal priorities changed". More on that in the week. We believe this junction is going to be Bristol's entry into the 2010 Bristol Traffic anti-bicycle awards.

In front of that "signal priorities changed" sign, two new bike stands:

Down on the A38 itself, three new stands have taken up a historic parking place of the city. Some people may think this is good, but look. The road is now permanently narrowed by bike stands, as well as being of no use to cars. There were two stands round the corner only used by the dissolving remains of a bike frame, so why add more?

Further up Zetland Road, you can see the bike stands force the local shops to double park their vans on the bus stop rather than get up on the pavement. This removes a parking place for one of their customers, so can impact sales in the area.

As an aside, please can the BCC give us some warning of their plans to put in bike stands. We like to take before pictures, to mourn the loss of street parking. Currently it is just a sheer coincidence that we tend to have before photos of cars on pavements in every location the council has added bike parking.

Monday, 25 January 2010

I'm often on that road, don't usually have a problem with that particular car. The one that parks on the corner by the garage or the massive caravan thing poking out are much worse.

Odd also how there is no mention of the 3-4 bicycles that are often chained up at the bottom of the road, between them all being shackled to the railings and lamppost they manage to block the whole pavement. I make sure to give them a nice kick on the way past.

Well, we always respond to customer feedback. This weekend the caravan looks OK, but yes, there is a van on the corner

However, as this is a quiet road for walking down, the van WF05YFG is not inconveniencing anyone.

The other side of the road, yes, the bicycles and the bins are a problem. Especially with that little street sign thing making it hard to get round.

If you look closely at the bikes, you can see that the back wheel of one is toast and these thing are not in active use. They are possibly abandoned by the previous years' students -who have moved onto proper jobs with proper transport- and are now left to clog up our streets.

This is another argument in favour of bicycle registration and taxing: you'd be able to recognise an abandoned bicycle by its expired license and so remove it immediately, the way the DVLA clamp cars. No printed/human readable tags though, nowhere for them. RFID tags embedded into the frames. Easy to scan, easy to track, a nice source of data.

This also shows another potential problem with the cycle city program. If the council want's to get people out and about on their bicycles, that means getting the bicycles out, which means that residents may not want to carry them up stairs -parking on the pavement is the remaining option.It's bad enough with their bike stands taking up space on shopping streets, even the back roads will suffer.

Sunday, 24 January 2010

Last week we saw how R848CGS was being harassed by students merely for parking on a build-out by a pedestrian crossing, in front of a hospital. Today we see that the council, rather than ticket pedestrians for occupying our pavement, is instead ticketing this car. Yet because the pavement has been widened here, there is plenty of room for pedestrians to get past.

Further down the hill in Kingsdown, KF02YWW is ticketed for parking in a disabled space.

Does Bristol Parking Services not realise that on a busy weekday, pavements and disabled parking spaces are the only spaces left for people to park? We don't want to use these spaces, but its always very frustrating driving round the block when there is a nice empty bit of pavement calling out to us, or an unused disabled parking bay. We are forced to use these spaces. And then what? They ticket us.

Saturday, 23 January 2010

A ticket, but no parking restrictions. Not even parked on the pavement.

So why is the owner of L740OYA being persecuted?

We suspect, because the owner is a cyclist. Why?

Well, cyclists don't need tax and insurance. This car certainly doesn't have tax, which implies it doesn't have insurance either (you need this to get a Vehicle Excise Duty disk). You also need an MOT, again something most cyclists don't bother with.

As we all know, cyclists don't care about the law, which is probably why the driver of this car chose to park it so blatantly near Redland Police Station with a nine month out-of-date disk.

We have a new nomination for our anti-bicycle awards, Rolls-Royce, as submitted by "RB". This is the sign at their new car park.
Now, readers may think? So what? It's a car park, of course bicycles should be banned. Nothing odd there and clearly something we agree with. Why is this special?

What we like here is the message. It tells any of their staff who cycle to work in the North Fringe, along the A38, on or near the A4174 ring road, that bicycles are not welcome in this part of the city. It tells them that Rolls-Royce, manufacturer of fine engines for civilian and military aircraft isn't doesn't care about the CO2 footprint of the manufacturing process, as if you are making jet engines the car traffic is background noise. Literally. And anyone who is going all fluffy and trying to make their commute a bit greener is an enemy of this part of the North Fringe industrial community. Not only do they slow down us tax-paying, income-earning commuters as they pootle down Filton Avenue, getting in the way in the first clear gap and a chance to put your foot down, they even get in the way in the car parks. But not here. We like this.

If we can't ban bicycles from our city, at least some of our bigger employers can do what they can to discourage their own staff from cycling, so reducing congestion in the North Fringe area, which is the S. Gloucester commuter destination covered in the cycling city project.

That is two nominations from S. Gloucs, none yet from Bristol. On that topic, please can cyclists stop submitting copies of the Muller Road toucan crossing, part of the Farm Pub to North Fringe route. Work only starts there on Monday, not eligible until 2011. We do have an alternate nomination though, the Gloucester Road/Zetland road junction. Subtle but lovely. Wait and see.

Thursday, 21 January 2010

Cotham Hill is fascinating, a single road that exemplifies all the conflicting needs of the city: pedestrians, of which there are too many for the narrow pavements. Intermittent trains arriving. Cars: the free parking pulls people in, and abandons them. The school run parents, the cyclists on a road too narrow for them, and the delivery vans and lorries.

What is not picked up on is why the delivery vans park on the pavement here. They are bringing supplies to the shops. Shops whose main customers are people on foot, be they students or train passengers. Those people need to pop in and by snacks and supplies, which means that a modern Just-In-Time supply chain needs to keep those shops full.

08:30, a train has just come in, and that means this is the perfect time for the delivery van YA55VDY to pull onto the pavement, park there on the zebra crossing zig-zags and see if there is anything needed this day. The fact that this interferes with car and cyclist visibility is unimportant: these are not the target customers.

A different day, a bit later on. Again, someone is bringing supplies to shops further up the road. No, pedestrians can't see to cross the road safely -but that gives them a perfect opportunity to visit one of the local cafes.

It is interesting that it is normally the same vehicle that appears in our database. The driver of the van YA55VDY must own the problem of keeping shops and cafes up this road fully supplied in milk and yoghourt related produce. With a single vehicle driving up the hill, stopping on the pavement wherever it needs to, congestion and road pollution is kept at at minimum.

If the pedestrians knew how hard work it was keeping them supplied in their morning, afternoon and evening snacks, perhaps they would be more appreciative of those people who struggle to pull it off -whatever the weather!

Wednesday, 20 January 2010

The roads are all briefly snow free, as are the pavements, so they can be used again. Not by pedestrians, who we still think should be made illegal, but by car drivers who prevent congestion problems by parking entirely off the road.

Here on Eastfield Road, the Audi RK08KCJ has to park here as the owner, through no fault of their own, only has a garage big enough for a 1970s hatchback.

Up at Hampton Road, some students have been causing havoc with the wipers on this car R848CGS strategically placed to stop pedestrians crossing. This is why when we get our laws against being a pedestrian pushed through, the fine for being a student pedestrian will be double.

And on Whiteladies road, we can see another traffic island that is no use to anyone, and just makes it harder to swing past bicycles.

This car NS03YJP has a disabled sticker, so it is legitimately parked here, before anyone complains. What we really want to highlit is in the background - some of the new Whiteladies road bike parking stands. They are stealing our pavements, our car parking spaces, again.

Tuesday, 19 January 2010

Police are appealing for witnesses and information after a fatal road traffic collision in Kingsdown, Bristol. The incident occurred on Monday 4th January 2010 at around 10.56am in Dove Street. A Honda Jazz was in collision with a low wall. The 82 year old driver died later in hospital.

This is sad, and it is something that seemed to miss getting coverage in the other local media outlets.

During the snows, ninetree became a sledge and snowboard route, not a driving option. Here is the view uphill, Dove Street is just visible to the left. This picture was taken five days before monday's death; things got icier.

The pavement was unusuable, pedestrians were in the road. No cyclists to worry about, just snowboarders and sledgers. Someone had wisely scraped all the snow off a bit of the road at the base, to stop such snow-users ending up on Stokes Croft.

Off to one side, no obvious cues as to whether Y64PNV had chosen to end up here or been forced that way by gravity. The tyre treads implied that the wheels had been rotating, so perhaps this was a parking action.

Visiting Dove Street a couple of days after the fatal incident, police signs are up and some tape is across the road; now broken. There was more tape on the lampposts at the bottom of nine-tree hill.

Otherwise, no details of what happened. Presumably the car started off on Dove street and then ended up on Ninetree hill, which turned out to be non-survivable. Either the driver deliberately went onto that road, or it was trying to park on Dove Street the way the cars above have, and somehow ended up on ninetree hill, at which point there weren't many options left.

It is a tragedy, and we extend our condolencies to friends and family.

Monday, 18 January 2010

We saw one parent cycling up Cotham Hill on the school-run last week. On a strange tandem thing where the kid goes in front, the dad behind. This is the kind of thing those cycling campaigners and living streets people will be thinking is sweet: someone turning the school run into exercise.

But wait, look at this blurred shot. The little girl is working, but the dad? He's just sitting there with his feet hanging off the pedals.

This is an electric bicycle, and while the child is helping out, the dad is just sitting there, doing nothing at all!

This destroys the whole "bicycles are a form of exercise" argument. You get more exercise pressing the stop and go pedals on a car, changing gear aggressively, spinning the wheel as you try and do a mini-roundabout while going from 1st to 3rd gears and texting your friends at the same time.

BBC 1 West is going to look at the Cycling City program at 19:30 tonight, with councillors and cycling activists talking about the cycle city program, and whether it is making progress. Will anyone be up there denouncing it for encouraging lazy parents to get on electric bikes and get in our way? We think not.

Take this car WN51VPV in the bus lane of Whiteladies road one weekday morning. It is not on the pavement, in the way of pedestrians. And if it was -that would still be acceptable, as it would not be blocking passing traffic.

It is not blocking passing car traffic: there is a lane for them. Nor is it blocking bus traffic, as you can see this bus is sliding past the car quite easily. Even the tax dodging cyclists you can see in the background will slide past this car without getting in the way of any tax payer.

To ticket this car for blocking a bus-lane on one of the city's primary inbound routes during the rush hour on a working weekday is nothing but profit seeking by an anti-car council!

The snow may have forced those pedestrians into our way, but it has at least shown up the harsh truth about all those cycle parks put in: the bikes there don't move.

Cotham Hill: bikes under snow

Clifton Down Shopping centre: all but one bike covered in a layer of snow

Whiteladies road: the wheel of whiteness

This shows how demand for bicycle parking is manufactured. Those cycle activists are secretly abandoning bikes all round the city, to create the illusion of popularity. We offered to tell the BBC this in a program to be broadcast on BBC1 at 19:30 on monday, but they turned us down.

Saturday, 16 January 2010

Just like the responsiveness of breakdown organisations is measured in time they take to turn up and fix the the problem, the competence of motoring press organisations ought to be assessed by how long they take to complain about something.

Yet it was only on Friday, seven days after we highlighted this issue that the AA, the nominal voice of the motorist, speaks out on this in a Daily Telegraph article:

And the AA warned pedestrians not to walk on gritted roads as a way of escaping icy pavements or mounds of snow piled high after roads had been ploughed.

See that? It took the AA a week to notice what a problem pedestrians were creating for us. And they weren't even specific about what they were threatening pedestrians with!

If the warning didn't say something like "or we will follow you home and cut the head of your household pet off and put in the bed" it isn't really a warning, is it? More a polite hint. Yet the pedestrians were out and about for a whole week. Above, in Alma Vale and St John's Roads in Clifton.

Below, in Cotham Hill. There you can see one man happily walking down the road, while a law-abiding pedestrian holds on to a lamppost to keep upright. She may not be able to get anywhere, but at least she won't be trying to use any zebra crossings or pressing buttons on pelican crossings.

The pedestrians should know that pavements are for them.

And for vehicles like P78RHW whose driver has struggled against adverse conditions to get to work at the NHS Hampton House facility. At least in these terrible conditions one part of the council -Bristol Parking Services- helped the motorists by staying in.

We're planning a little critique of the Association of British Drivers for being out of touch, but the AA, the big fault there is that despite their leader, Edmund King, being good at getting quotes into the printed news, if their quotes are a week behind the issues in our streets, what use is that? They are coming out and complaining about pedestrians in the roadway just when the snow and ice is all going away. And they don't even warn cyclists to stay off the roads as they aren't welcome in UK cities.

Bristol Traffic: up to date with the issues, timely with the news. Prepared to speak the truth. The real voice of Bristol's Motorists.

Friday, 15 January 2010

The snow has given us less cyclists to denounce, so here is something from before the snows came.

Here we see a Royal Mail delivery bicycle, insensitively blocking the pavement by the zebra crossing on Cotham Road South, the one with the Mercedes F55CNU parked on the zig-zags

This makes it much harder for pedestrians to get down the pavement safely, such as the one coming up alongside the Saab Y848PBJ parked on the other set of zig-zags on this side of the road.

These cyclists have no sense of pedestrian safety! They park wherever is closest to their destination! They pop in and out without a thought to convenience and safety of pedestrians and other road users!

We should write a stern letter to the Evening Post! That will stop them!

Thursday, 14 January 2010

Some people may have suspected that we were making up things, telling porkys. Not so. Our claims were picked up and repeated on facebook by one of the world's premier bollard vendors, which made us wonder -should we do more research?

First, down to Monty. Even though Jan 6, Epiphany, has passed, the Bollards are still painted. You can see how their colours stand out well in front of KR03URE, S788RUH and our old friend, YJ52HYE. The new movable bollard, sporting a traffic cone and tilting badly, stands out.

Then online, search bollard+crimean+war.References do appear, including from pages that predate our posting, showing that any accusations of falsehood on this site, any claims that we make things up, are entirely without foundation.

Wednesday, 13 January 2010

There are some new signs up on Aberdeen Road, outside St Peter and Paul RC Primary School. They say no parking on the school-keep-clear area on weekdays 08:00 to 17:00.

This is more of the city's simply insane anti-car activities, something everyone should resist. We have discovered a loophole.

By banning parking on weekdays, there is nothing to stop any local parking entirely on the pavement on a weekend.

This will protect wing mirrors, and with the bollard, ensure the body-coloured bumper of OY05LNW won't suffer any damage from other vehicles reversing into it while parking.

It will even benefit the schoolchildren, as more snow is scheduled for the evening -this car will ensure the area will be snow- and later ice- free. With such selfless drivers, it doesn't matter than the council appears scared to grit paths.

It seems that the blogosphere does have a use. Here at Bristol Traffic we use it to promote the car and pavement parking, whilst relentlessly pursuing an anti-cyling agenda.

Others, however, appear to use blogging as some sort of way getting messages across, to Bristol City Council, for example. Over on the BristolGreenBlog Chris Hutt managed to be challenged to a dual by Cllr Jon Rogers.

It seems that today, possibly as a result of that dual, we motorists are now being scorned as Bristol City Council begin to actually clear the pavements. We have photographic evidence, gathered by our roaming reporter, that highly visible gangs of ex-Street Cleaners are actively trying to improve the conditions of Bristol's pavements.

In less residential areas, then the council should make clearing pavements a priority as many important people have to leave their cars in distant places and walk to work (sorry, thought I was on Bristol Traffic).

NHS stats and injuries: Sunday was the busiest day ever at Frenchay Emergency Department, due to ice related injuries. I imagine the same is true elsewhere and I have been told the ambulance service have had a record number of calls over the last two weeks.

Obviously we don't care about pedestrian A&E statistics, but we do need to correct this idea that important people need to walk to work. Only those without courage to park right outside their destination practise park+walk, we believe in park on pavement with hazard lights on. As for the snow, given all important people have 4X4, it makes it easier for us park, because there are many more spaces, such as here on Chandos Road.

No, what annoys us is this

Not gritting the pavements encourages pedestrians to walk in our roads.

This slows us down, and here, they even walk the wrong way down a one way street! They are as bad as their tax-dodging fellow travellers, the cyclists.

Worse than that, some are not just walking to the supermarket, they are taking their sledge there, pootling along with the entire family! This sets a terrible example, as this small child will now expect to walk around the city, maybe even play on the pavements, so endanger themselves.

Look what happened when our reporter stopped these people and told them off! They laughed! Here we were, thinking of the safety of the people, especially their little one, and all they could do was laugh at everything we said.

These pedestrians have no respect. The sooner they are pushed back onto the pavement, the better. Even if we still need most of it to park.